September 12, 2019—In our community we encourage training records and PATs, but should testing be mandatory for service dog teams? In a revealing new article, PSDP’s Brad Morris explains why “Forced service dog testing is not the fix you might think“.

August 5, 2019—Registration for the 2020 PSDP convention in Rock Hill, South Carolina is now open! Join us to make heartwarming and psyche-strengthening memories April 3rd–6th. Register in 2019 for a 25% discount!

March 22, 2019—Convention registration ended March 4th. If you can’t make it to our South Carolina convention this year, at least you can enjoy our new convention videos! The first one is a kind of tour of the convention, while the second is a 60-second peek into the activities on our Public Access Test (PAT).

February 12, 2019—Learn what various types of service dog users have to say about community solidarity. Our Feb. 1st press release now has a captioned recording of our guide dog conference panel, which is also here in tiny form:

January 1, 2019—Channel that positive new-year energy and discover ways to improve the world! Get tips on how to use your interests and strengths with our Easy advocacy how-to. It’s designed to provide a menu of simple options everyone can choose something from. Try it out and make yourself better along the way!

Work & Tasks

Want to know more about service dog tasks—how to define them, and examples? Confused as to why some people forget about the work service dogs can do, or why old service dog tasks vs. work distinctions don’t make sense?

PSDP authoritatively addresses these issues and provides a bonus collection of community members’ work and task stories, complete with pictures and video. Dive in with the links below, or dip your intellectual toe in first with the text below the links.

A service dog may provide many different trained behaviors to help a person with a disability. These may be divided into passively-available work or actively-requested tasks.

Service dog tasks are on-demand services that are requested by the handler each time. It is often obvious when a task is being carried out, such as when a handler asks a service dog to retrieve a dropped leash that the handler cannot reach.

Service dog work is not requested by the handler, but the dog is on-call to provide the specific help when cued by a change in the handler or the handler’s environment. Examples of work include a psychiatric service dog alerting its handler to an impending panic attack, and a guide dog working to direct its handler around a novel obstacle.

About our service dog tasks and work resources…

Our primary resource on psychiatric service dog tasks and work is our Work and Task List. This work and task list contains a community-driven collection of psychiatric symptoms, assistive behaviors for each psychiatric symptom, and whether the assistance behaviors are service dog work, service dog tasks, or could be either.

For those who want to better understand the distinction between service dog tasks and work, or why it’s not true that service dogs have to be task-trained to do three service dog tasks, we have everything you could hope for!

As always, one of our best resources for helping you learn about and train service dog tasks and work is the Peer Guidance Group (listserv). Experienced peers in our community love to help others learn on the listserv!